Dispatches from the world of academic marxism

A Note on Chibber, Chatterjee, and Guha

Though many things are being said about Vivek Chibber’s new book, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, it is unlikely at this point that anyone will call the book boring. It has ignited a fair amount of controversy in its claim that the central arguments emerging from Subaltern Studies are wrong, and that a universalist social theory grounded in Marxism is capable of explaining the phenomena they fail to.

The posting of Chibber’s debate with Partha Chatterjee, one of the main targets of critique in the book, at Historical Materialism New York, will no doubt only intensify the disputes. Indeed, some are already claiming that Chatterjee has closed the book on Chibber’s arguments with his “meticulous demolition” a few weeks ago.

In this post, I’d like to examine one small aspect of the debate, centering around the contending interpretations of Ranajit Guha’s work. It is my contention that Chatterjee, in attempting to defend Guha, misrepresents the latter’s arguments, often strikingly.

Before proceeding, it is worth noting what this post is not arguing. I am not asserting here that either Chatterjee or Guha’s work is worthless or should not be read. Indeed, Guha’s criticisms of the bad faith of colonialist historiography, his portrait of the way aspects of Indian culture were mobilized to support colonial rule, and his emphasis on the brutality of the raj are all valuable and compelling. I am less familiar with Chatterjee’s work, and for that reason do not want anything in this post to be construed as a broader commentary on his other publications. However, the issue of misrepresentation is a serious one, and deserves consideration.

Chibber lays out his side of the argument briefly in an interview about the book published at Jacobin:

Subaltern studies offers two distinct arguments for how and why the universalizing drive of capital was blocked. One argument comes from Ranajit Guha. Guha located the universalizing drive of capital in the ability of a particular agent — namely, the bourgeoisie, the capitalist class — to overthrow the feudal order and construct a coalition of classes that includes not only capitalists and merchants, but also workers and peasants. And through the alliance that is cobbled together, capital is supposed to erect a new political order, which is not only pro-capitalist in terms of defending the property rights of capitalists, but also a liberal, encompassing, and consensual order.

So for the universalizing drive of capital to be real, Guha says, it must be experienced as the emergence of a capitalist class that constructs a consensual, liberal order. This order replaces the ancien régime, and is universalizing in that it expresses the interests of capitalists as universal interests. Capital, as Guha says, achieves the ability to speak for all of society: it is not only dominant as a class, but also hegemonic in that it doesn’t need to use coercion to maintain its power.

So Guha locates the universalizing drive in the construction of an encompassing political culture. The key point for Guha is that the bourgeoisie in the West was able to achieve such an order while the bourgeoisie in the East failed to do so. Instead of overthrowing feudalism, it made some sort of compact with the feudal classes; instead of becoming a hegemonic force with a broad, cross-class coalition, it tried its best to suppress the involvement of peasants and the working class. Instead of erecting a consensual and encompassing political order, it put into place highly unstable and fairly authoritarian political orders. It maintained the rift between the class culture of the subaltern and that of the elite.

So for Guha, whereas in the West the bourgeoisie was able to speak for all the various classes, in the East it failed in this goal, making it dominant but not hegemonic. This in turn makes modernity in the two parts of the world fundamentally different by generating very different political dynamics in the East and West, and this is the significance of capital’s universalizing drive having failed.

JB: So their argument rests on a claim about the role of the bourgeoisie in the West, and the failure of its counterpart in postcolonial societies?

VC: For Guha, absolutely, and the subaltern studies group accepts these arguments, largely without qualification. They describe the situation — the condition of the East — as a condition in which the bourgeoisie dominates but lacks hegemony, whereas the West has both dominance and hegemony.

Now the problem with this is, as you said, that the core of the argument is a certain description of the achievements of the Western bourgeoisie. The argument, unfortunately, has very little historical purchase. There was a time, in the nineteenth century, the early twentieth century, even into the 1950s, when many historians accepted this picture of the rise of the bourgeoisie in the West. Over the last thirty or forty years, though, it has been largely rejected, even among Marxists.

What’s strange is that Guha’s book and his articles were written as though the criticisms of this approach were never made. And what’s even stranger is that the historical profession — within which subaltern studies has been so influential — has never questioned this foundation of the subaltern studies project, even though they all announce that it’s the foundation. The bourgeoisie in the West never strove for the goals that Guha ascribes to it: it never tried to bring about a consensual political culture or represent working-class interests. In fact, it fought tooth and nail against them for centuries after the so-called bourgeois revolutions. When those freedoms were finally achieved, it was through very intense struggle by the dispossessed, waged against the heroes of Guha’s narrative, the bourgeoisie. So the irony is that Guha really works with an incredibly naïve, even ideological notion of the Western experience. He doesn’t see that capitalists have everywhere and always been hostile to the extension of political rights to working people.

These arguments are expanded upon in Chapters 2-5 of Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital.

To rebut Chibber’s criticisms, Chatterjee offered four arguments:

1.) Guha’s text is not comparative at all, and does not make any claims about what actually happened during the development of European capitalism. Rather, it simply comments on what liberal historiography assumed would happen in India. Therefore, Chibber’s argument that Guha compares India to a European history that never happened is simply the product of an inept reading. (made at 27:23 in the debate)

2.) Guha is not actually talking about what capitalists did or did not do, but instead is speaking of a much broader anticolonial elite. Therefore, Chibber’s attempt to compare their actions with the actions of European capitalists is an invalid exercise in comparing two very different kinds of social entities. (31:00)

3.) Guha does not hold a Whig view of history. The Whiggish view Chibber criticizes is precisely what Guha is criticizing in liberal historiography. (30:45)

4.) The appropriate grounds of comparison, and the one Guha is actually making, is between England and India of the 1950s, not between the European bourgeois revolutions and modern Indian history. The comparison Chibber makes renders the contemporary history of India nothing more than a replay of Europe’s past, an extraordinarily Eurocentric maneuver. (31:44).

All four of these arguments represent serious distortions of the arguments made in Dominance without Hegemony. In order:

1.) Chatterjee claims that “nowhere in the essay does Guha offer any propositions of his own that might be construed as a historical sociology of bourgeois revolutions in England and France.” What, then, are we to make of passages such as the following?

“liberal historiography has been led to presume that capital, in its Indian career, succeeded in overcoming the obstacles to its self-expansion and subjugating all precapitalist relations in material and spiritual life well enough to enable the bourgeoisie to speak for all of that society, as it had done on the occasion of its historic triumphs in England in 1648 and France in 1789.” (Dominance without Hegemony, 19)

“Much of the specificity of Indian politics of this period derives precisely from the failure of nationalism to assimilate the class interests of peasants and workers effectively into a bourgeois hegemony. Nothing testifies more clearly to the predicament of a bourgeoisie nurtured under colonial conditions and its difference from its opposite numbers in Western Europe…In other words, it was initially as an acknowledgment of the connection between its own interests and those of all the other nonruling classes that the bourgeoisie had led the struggle against feudalism and established its hegemony over the peasantry, whereas in India the influence it gained over the rural population in the 1920s and 1930s did not develop into a full-fledged hegemony because of its reluctance to break with landlordism. Again, in Western Europe, the conditions prevailing under the ancien regime did not allow the interests of the bourgeoisie to be reduced at once to “the particular interest of a particular class.” (ibid 133-134)

“how is it that even after British capital, powered by industrialism, had come of age and the culture corresponding to it had created a homogeneous space for itself by overcoming the resistance of all that was parochial and particularistic in metropolitan politics — how is it that even at its hour of triumph the universalist tendency was resigned to live at peace with the heterogeneity and particularity of the indigenous political culture of an Asian colony?” (ibid 64)

Here, in locations throughout the 1997 text, Guha is quite plainly making claims about what actually happened in Europe during the period of the rise of capitalism. In two of these passages, there is not even a reference to the liberal historiography which Chatterjee claims is Guha’s true reference. Instead, we have what are unavoidably statements about the history of capitalism in Europe, in which it is claimed that the bourgeoisie led the struggle against feudalism, overcame the resistance of the particular, established a homogenous space, and was thus able to speak for the nation. Even in the first passage, which begins by referencing the liberal historiography, the sentence’s final clause implies that the bourgeoisie was actually able to speak for all of society after 1648 and 1789.

Chatterjee’s description of what is in Guha’s text is then quite plainly false. But he also argues that Guha does not require any historical sociology of bourgeois revolution in Europe to substantiate his claims. This is a more complicated argument to adjudicate, as it cannot be settled simply with references to the text. However, I think there are still good reasons to think that Chatterjee is wrong here. It is quite true that the overwhelming bulk of Dominance without Hegemony is not focused on the question of what happened in India versus what happened in Europe. Guha’s explication of the role of Dharma, of the ideological machinations of colonialist historiography, and of the dynamics of nationalist struggle do not depend on any claims about Europe. Indeed, Chibber says as much in the book, praising Guha’s empirical description of Indian history while contesting his theoretical explanation of it. It is this theoretical account which depends upon a comparison between Europe and India. Chatterjee is correct to claim that, for his critique of historiography, Guha only needs evidence a) that the liberal historiography assumes that the bourgeoisie enjoyed hegemony in Europe b) that it also enjoyed hegemony in the colonies c) that Indian liberals saw the postcolonial order as similarly hegemonic and d) that neither the colonial nor the postcolonial regimes enjoyed hegemony. Unfortunately for Chatterjee, however, Guha offers us rather more than a criticism of the historiography. Indeed, in the second passage quoted above, Guha is quite explicit that the failure of the Indian bourgeoisie explains “the specificity of Indian politics.” For this claim to be successful, one must assume the bourgeoisie succeeded elsewhere. If the bourgeoisie failed in Europe as well as in India, how could its failure in India explain the specificity of Indian politics? Guha’s argument does indeed imply claims about what happened in European history, and, as we have seen, he is not at all shy about making these claims.

2.) Chatterjee’s claim that Guha is not talking about Indian capitalists, but rather Indian nationalist elites, is wrong on several levels. The argument is proffered as an attempt to rebut Chibber’s claims about the French Revolution, where he argues, in the tradition of political Marxism, that the French bourgeoisie who participated in the revolution was in no sense capitalist, and that therefore the French revolution cannot be taken as an example of the capitalist bourgeoisie succeeding in forging hegemony and speaking for the nation. Chatterjee argues in response that Guha is only describing nationalist elites, not capital. It is unclear what exactly he thinks is gained by making this point. On the surface, there is the obvious effect that this claim, if true, would buttress his general argument that Chibber has misunderstood Guha. However, it does little to rehabilitate Guha’s theoretical claim – namely that the French bourgeoisie succeeded in speaking for the nation, while the Indian bourgeoisie failed. Even assuming that we are talking about non-capitalist bourgeoisies in both cases, Chibber shows that the French revolution was wracked with class conflict, with the bourgeoisie fighting for a very limited set of reforms, while attempting at every turn to restrict and repress the development of more popular insurgencies. As in India, there was no hegemony. Abstracting from the question of capital, the attempt at contrast still fails.

Moving into Guha’s text itself, we find that once again Chatterjee’s attempts to defend Guha run aground on the pages of the very work he purports to be defending. Guha offers an expansive picture of the bourgeoisie in India, encompassing nationalist elites, Indian capitalists, and British capitalists. Indeed, his references to capital’s universalizing tendency throughout the book make clear that his argument is very much about what capital failed to do. Restricting his arguments to cover only nationalist elites is a distortion of the text.

3.) Chatterjee claims that Guha does not hold a Whig view of history, but rather criticizes the one found in the texts of liberal historiography. Yet Chibber’s argument that Guha, by claiming that the European bourgeoisie fought for liberty and democracy, romanticizes the bourgeoisie, finds substantial support throughout Guha’s text. Guha names, among the “achievements” of the bourgeoisie, “democracy” and “liberty” (67). He describes “bourgeois law” as having made “inviolable…the individual’s right to the security of his or her own person” (26). And he describes it as a “paradox” that forms of pre-capitalist oppression were mobilized by “the world’s most advanced bourgeoisie.”

In these statements, the European bourgeoisie receives credit for a series of reforms it actually struggled tooth and nail against. As Chibber notes, by the time the English Reform Act of 1832 was passed, the English electorate was actually smaller than it had been in 1630 (65). Almost two centuries of bourgeois rule yielded precious little evidence that the European bourgeoisie had any interest in democracy. Similarly, the description of the inviolability of the individual body whitewashes the sordid history of the consolidation of bourgeois rule in England, ably recounted in Peter Linebaugh’s The London Hanged and Domenico Losurdo’s Liberalism: A Counter-History. Finally, the utilization of precapitalist institutions in the interest of capital accumulation is hardly a paradox. Karen Orren’s Belated Feudalism tells the story of precisely such a dynamic in the United States. In Europe, the consolidation of capitalism often took place in part through a similar process, as in England, where market dependency among peasants was achieved through the assertion of a host of lordly rights to the land. In short, Guha attributes to the bourgeoisie a number of properties – an interest in liberty and democracy, a proclivity to do away with precapitalist social forms, and an investment in the rule of law – which the historical record simply does not support. This is what it means to draw on a Whig view of history. It is view that exists in the texts Guha is criticizing, to be sure, but finds expression throughout his own text as well.

4.) Chatterjee’s last claim is in some ways the most puzzling. The motivation for the criticism is easy enough to understand; it is the familiar postcolonial critique that Marxism too often reduces the history of the colonial world to Europe’s pre-history. Yet, as we have seen, it is precisely Guha who makes this claim, bringing up the revolutions of 1648 and 1789 as points of comparison with the development of capitalism in India. I will only add to this that, in focusing so heavily on the period of Indian independence, Chatterjee obscures both Guha’s text and Chibber’s critique of it, neither of which have anything resembling an exclusive focus on the moment of independence, but consider the history of Indian capitalism as a whole.

Why go through this unfortunately lengthy exercise in correction? A few reasons. First, as I have noted, Chatterjee is already being celebrated for allegedly knocking out Chibber in the debate. It is hard to square such plaudits with the reality of his misrepresentations of Guha’s text.

More fundamentally, however, I think both Chatterjee’s claims in the debate, and the support they have found, are indicative of the state of the left academy. To put it bluntly, bullshit, in the Frankfurtian sense, rules the day. Chatterjee’s cavalier misrepresentation of the text he purports to be defending seems a classic token of the concept.

20 Responses

The “bullshit” problem here falls far more on Chibber’s title than any of Chatterjee’s claims. What’s next Feminist Theory and the Specter of Capital? Let’s reduce away any difference which doesn’t comport itself comfortably to a vulgar, orthodox Marxist theory? Lets claim one school of thought within a vast spectrum represents the entire school? Really?! You think that’s not bullshit?

Some valid criticism of Chatterjee and what is clearly his effort to defend his own intellectual guru, though none of it confirms the “universalist social theory grounded in Marxism” that Chibber purports to be upholding. The notion that “democracy” and “liberty” were products of complex struggles in the West only implies that that culture itself is complex and contested, but it does not in any way confirm that what is at stake in this contest is some base underlying desire to maximize economic interest, as a vulgar Marxism based on a utilitarian economic theory would have it. I haven’t read Chibber’s book yet, so I can’t speak to the specifics of it, but I have no doubt that such a theory would mutilate the history of both South Asia and Europe.

I love how nobody (except political Marxists) can distinguish between “vulgar, orthodox Marxists” and political Marxists, who developed their theories as an explicit challenge to the orthodoxies of Marxism. *Sigh*

I genuinely enjoyed concerned citizen’s comment, as an example of a type of objection to an argument best encapsulated by the much maligned Lord Denning in his 1980 decision to refuse the Birmingham Six’s appeal.

Lord Denning, you will recall, refused their appeal not on the basis of an evaluation of merits of their case, but instead on the rather straightforward basis that allowing their appeal would open up an “appalling vista”, namely the undermining of the reputation and authority of the police. An “appalling vista” response rarely has any intellectual rigour to it, but it does often have the merit of revealing the “real” reason rather than the “good” reason why someone objects to an argument.

Very illuminating for people like me who have not read Guha. I did, however, watch a video of the debate and having read this critique it appears to me that there was a bit of shadow boxing between Mr Chiibber and Mr Chatterjee. Chiibber’s opening comments about the subaltern studies project appear to give too much importance to Ranajit Guha’s original influence. I don’t know whether the book makes a similar identification between Guha and Subaltern Studies, since I haven’t read it. But, my own reading of Subaltern Studies makes me believe that the real standout theoretician in the collective was Partha Chatterjee himself.

In fact, I submit, that Mr Chibber has found an easy target in Guha, while Mr Chatterjee is misrepresenting Guha to state his own position (and that of Dipesh Chakravarty) which was very different. In fact, it is here that Mr Chibber comes appears to be entirely innocent of Marxian political economy, as outlined in Capital. As Mr Chatterjee points out, for Marx, the essential characteristic of Capital is that it pumps out surplus labour as value. States differently it means capital homogenises labour as a use-value and this enables the emergence of abstract labour. Labour has no exchange value, but labour power does. Labour power is a unique commodity that creates more value than it consumes (necessary labour). This allows for exploitation (extraction of surplus labour) through the economic process of the expanded circulation of capital itself M1-C +LP….C2 – M2, where the gap …. denotes the production process in which surplus labour becomes surplus value. Surplus value is created before it enters the circulation of money. In other words, the process of exploitation begins in the market but is actualised in the direct production process itself and is then monetized in the market. This is the reason for the ability of capital to reproduce itself without extra-economic coercion. This, again is the necessary, but nit sufficient condition for the existence of bourgeois democracy and its concomitant institutions and apparatuses.

Of course, for this to happen, it also must be preceded by (structurally, not temporally) by “the so-called primitive accumulation of capital”. Marx deliberately adds the pejorative “so-called” to this concept to criticise this term borrowed from classical political economy, where it plays the role of originary wealth accumulated before it can be deployed as capital. For Marx, the primitive accumulation of capital is nothing but the separation of labour power and the means of production.

This is the thrust of the early contributions of Partha Chatterjee and Dipesh Chakravarty and this is precisely the issue that Mr Chatterjee raises I’m his debate with Mr Chibber. Unfortunately, Mr Chibber appears to be more anti-Das Kapital than anti-capital (reminiscent of the late English comedian EP Thompson). Mr Chatterjee, on the other hand, in his early years, was raising this very question — is it possible to complete primitive accumulation in a colony when bourgeois democratic institutions are already in place in the capitalist world and when the national bourgeoise is trying to establish those same institutions in the colony itself? What kind of political forms does it inevitably lead to? One of Mr Chatterjee’s inelegant attempts to solve this problem was to come up with a quasi-structuralist schema which he termed as modes of power. He quickly abandoned that to enter the sphere of identity politics and here his departure from Marxism was complete.

Oddly enough Mr Chatterjee has returned to his original query as he confronts a new reality — new methods of peasant organisation at a time when governmentality has taken deep roots. He has come up with early descriptive concepts here, in lieu of a theory, but his notion of political society has many useful clues for future elaboration ad refinement.

Having not read Mr Chibber’s book I have no right to comment on his theoretical defence of Marxism. But, in the debate with Partha Chatterjee it is the subaltern studies founder who clearly comes across as a more orthodox Marxist than Mr Chibber.

There was a good deal of anti-colonial historiography taking place in India, a lot of it Marxist in orientation and the Subalternists, beginning with Guha distorted and misinterpreted all that by name calling,deploying terms like elitists, liberals, linguistically inadequate, etc. It was in the mid 1980’s , a bad time for the left, though opportune for those professing to be subalternists. They gave up on Marxism, devised critiques only known to them, turned anti-Marxists and turned to applying works of Foucault, Derrida, Barthes, some Adorno and other radicals ho were popular in the universities in U S and some other places. Marxism was shunted out because it formed the basis of a theory of colonialism and even neo-colonialism, which were not popular in the universities of U S or U K, barring some. The question is whether they had any critique of what they were after. If the critique is limited to liberal ideology and elitism this doers not overcome the theory of colonialism. Liberal is simply used as a bad word and there is no worthwhile estimation of liberalism [ how much?] in a colony like India. Mostly some `native intellectuals’ are blamed or smothered for holding liberal ideas. But the question is far from settled. Indian liberalism was not that bad as subalterns make out be, in many ways it may have been superior to many `western’ [ mainly British] traditions of liberalism. But of greater import is the subject of reciprocity between the English working-class, the Chartists and rebels of British empire. The Chartists were not as much opposed to the liberal tradition as they were against British militarism and imperialism. This is the kind of theme that needs to be worked upon – there is more than enough source- but it would simply pass by the Subaltern imagination. Then there are major theoretical deficiencies, What does it imply to hold anthropology over phenomenology and psychology, as Chatterjee insists on anthropological investigations. It is doubtful if anthropology is anything more than a pseudo-science. moreover it served current imperial interests. The subalterns have done hardly any work on political economy or economic globalization. What do they mean by the term, universality? Just phonetics or what. Partha Chatterjee is a decent and an inquiring mind so I don’t want to pick issues with him. But Guha’s theoretical stuff is just bullshit.He is just not up to it yet he has cronies to applaud his theoretical acumen. His reading of Hegel is atrocious and I wonder if he has read and retained at least one volume of Das Kapital by Karl Marx. I think it is a futile debate and let each side take its own route, if anything is left. Lastly can anyone enlighten me on what is post-colonial theory ?

The difference in Chibber’s approach and Chatterjee and Guha’s approach consists in two different approaches to the question of politics. Chibber feels that political arguments can be derived directly from the logic of capital. Chatterjee and Guha’s do not argue this. For them, politics must be understood in the context of hegemony. Chibber’s argument consists of forcing Chatterjee and Guha’s claims into his own framework and showing that they become inconsistent as a result. This may be true, but it doesn’t prove anything more than the fact that Chibber disagrees with them.

Now, it is strictly nonsense to claim, as Chibber does, that capital can become hegemonic at x y or z moment because capital as such is not a class. If anybody can find me a single moment in Gramsci’s work where relative surplus value, primitive accumulation, the concept of justice, or the price of sheet metal operate as actors independently of their representatives in the state and civil society, I will gladly drop the point. But there are no such moments in Gramsci, and there are no such moments in Chatterjee or Guha’s work. We can discuss the validity of _that_, but it is entirely pointless to fault them for not arguing in a way other than they do, for no other reason than the fact that it happens not to be the approach one likes.

Oddly enough, this is a principle assidiously honored in Guha’s work. When Guha speaks of “the bourgeoisie [speaking] for all of that society, as it had done on the occasion of its historic triumphs in England in 1648 and France in 1789,” he is not asserting that it actually did so.He is describing a very familiar and not terribly controversial claim about the role of the revolution which is made explicitly and implicitly in virtually all nationalist historiography of those countries and which has had an immense impact on the way that history, in general, is written. In short, he is referring to a claim which has become hegemonic. Guha’s other citations of extremely uncontroversial truisms about European history follow the same pattern.

If Guha elsewhere appears to be making claims of substance about the relationship between the bourgeoisie and the peasantry, it is always in comparison to the difference of the Indian case. It is simply hairsplitting to contend that these statements amount to a historical sociology because they do not happen to be cited in the form of block quotations.

As for the claim that perhaps the bourgeoisie did not acheive hegemony in France, if that is the case it seems difficult to see how hegemony has ever been achieved anywhere. In any case, the broader claim that hegemony was not acheived because conflict still existed misunderstands Gramsci’s concept. Hegemony is not how politics ends. It is how politics starts. When Guha argues that substantial parts of the Indian population were never included under the hegemony of the elite, he does not mean that this subaltern population failed to agree with that elite. He means that it was never included in said project and never formed a collective identity in relation to it, and thus regardless of what it did, its actions were not intelligible to said elite and not carried out in relation to it.

Guha is thus not romanticizing said nationalist elite. He is-depending on how one chooses to view things-alternately criticizing its political solipsism or trying to find a basis for subaltern politics outside of the nationalist state. These criticisms have entirely real bases in recent Indian history, not least the Emergency in the early 1980’s, when the Congress party declared a state of emergency and also engaged in ‘progressive’ campaigns of rural improvement which lead to widespread violence.

Now, whether or not one sees a structural similarity in this relationship of exclusion between the nationalist elite and subalterns to another relationship between labor and capital is an interesting question. But it is not substantively or historically the same relationship, and it is wildly disingenuous to claim that this analysis fails because it fails to understand everything in terms of labor and capital.

Finally, dismissing a fairly straight Gramscian argument as academic ‘bullshit’ (to cite the concept used) from the point of view of a far _more_ academic conception of Marx’s work than Gramsci’s would be one of the funniest misrecognitions of historical position in recent memory if it weren’t so sadly indicative of the sorry state of left political practice in general these days.

Oh, so we should simply take your word for it that Guha isn’t *actually* talking about what happened in Europe, but just the historiography? Even in passages that make no reference to the historiography? Guha is a very clear and well-organized writer. When he discusses the historiography, he is very clear that that is what he is doing. Similarly, when he is not, he is also very clear. I’m envious that your privileged insight into the working of Guha’s mind allows you to grasp meanings beyond those found in the text, but for those of us without such gifts, perhaps you could offer some actual evidence as to why we should read a passage such as the one on 133-34 as only discussing the historiography, and not making any claims about actual European history?

Look, I don’t have the book on me. If you’d like me to credential my understanding of it somehow I guess I can tell you that I’m somewhat familiar with Chatterjee and Guha’s work but really know more about Gramsci. And I am pretty sure that is the point of reference for both writers’ approach to historiography. I don’t know how to prove this to you apart from block-quoting chunks of the appropriate bibliographies or digging through old Subaltern Studies essays.
Anyway, if this is going to devolve into an argument about authoritative and non-authoritative arguments all I can think to say is that people don’t normally insist on inline citations in responses to blog posts. I appreciate the thought you put into the original response to the debate here and spent a little bit of time on my response–not as much as you did on the original, I’m sure. But I’m not sure why I’ve hit such a nerve. This is particularly the case since I’m probably more critical of Chibber here than you.

As a postscript, presumably we’re here to have a productive disagreement, not to obliterate each others’ positions so as to make it as if neither had ever existed. There are books which indeed would have been better left unwritten, but we are not discussing any such books here.

I happen to think that what Chibber is doing is valuable–the carpet was rolled up on subaltern studies a couple of years go and if you read more recent work of Chaterjee’s, at least, you’ll see he’s now endorsing a position which is much closer to Hardt and Negri’s wrt the universalism/particularism question. I just think Chibber could have raised the issue in a better way, and it seems prima facie implausible to assert that the metric yards of stuff written around a single program in subaltern studies were actually just built on some simple conceptual error or that ss was actually backdoor Orientalism the whole time.

This is a rather bizzare post which clearly does not understand a lot of the basics of subaltern studies work, as the comment prior to this very ably points out.

The absolute dishonesty of Vivek Chibber’s claims about France and England are plainly apparent in the way he present a set of “Facts” as if there is absolutely *no* debate surrounding either the French or the English revolutions, thereby making it appear as if his (Chibber’s) word is the final and most accurate in the debate. More importantly. Chibber – and almost all Western commentators (like Zizek and Brenner) who have not even the slightest idea of anything that happened in the wider world – do not even understand the main point of Ranajit Guha or the other subalternists’ work. Guha’s book is not ABOUT France or England. It is a dense engagement with intellectual traditions and historiography in India. Of course, in order to understand this one has to read a little more of Indian history than Chibber’s pathetic summary, and read Dominance without Hegemony keeping this in mind.

This relates directly to the quotes in this post that apparently demonstrate what an immature, inaccurate and poor reader of both Guha and Chibber Chatterjee is. Returning to this is like coming back to the most basic 101 debates on the distinctions between History and Historiography. As is clear to anyone who even glances as Guha’s work, it is mainly an engagement with the latter. The “factual claims” made in D w/out H relate to questions around the *interpretation* of history made by Indian historians writing from within different ideological frameworks. Just as varied ideologies (Marixst, Revisionist etc.) lead to different interpretations of French and English history, the same occurs in the case of India. A few factual references (related to the *assumptions* of nationalist and marxist historiography in India), DO NOT make Guha’s text a”historical sociology”. The problem is precisely that Chibber is a (poor) historical sociologist who reads subaltern history texts *as if* they were historical sociologies and then claims that these texts fail the standards demanded of them. In the process of course, Chibber demonstrates that he neither has any interest or any clue about the intricacies of Indian history and historiography. A rigorous challenge to subaltern studies has to be mounted on Those terms, not by revealing how Guha supposedly “misread” French history and was a bad sociologist.

All of this brings us to a much more basic question: is this post, its defenders, Chibber or anyone else actually, seriously claiming that the position Guha etc. critiques NEVER EXISTED or DOESN’T EXIST in academic readings of the French and English revolutions? Are we to mourn that Guha did not write, in the 1980s, a point-by-point rebuttal of Domenico Losurdo’s 2011 book? This is prime bullshit (but in the commonsense meaning of the term!) The arguments Guha etc. combated were prevalent – in fact Dominant – at the time, regardless of the “historical record supporting” them or not. Subaltern Studies did not establish itself to “correctly” read European history. It was a challenge to dominant modes of interpreting Indian history based on certain understandings of European history. I doubt Guha or anyone would care two hoots about new research that shows developments in France or England didn’t happen the way they claimed: because THEY never claimed anything! Based on dominant interpretations of European history, SS said commented on the particularities of India. Chibber’s “true” targets are not SS but those Indian and Western historians who made these supposed misreadings of the French and English revolutions commonsensical in the first place. Except of course, Marxist Theory And the Spectre of Capital doesn’t sound sexy enough for Verso or Navayana.

By the way, when was the last time Zizek, Brenner and Chomsky agreed on the history of Europe? Or Marxism? They all “recommend” Chibber. Why? Have any of these people ever read Indian history? Can they pass a basic undergraduate test on SS? Or is it their vicious hatred for postcolonial theory that makes them ideal people to recommend this book and in the process admit that its alright to interpret Europe differently, but the Third-World! Perish at the thought. Did Chibber notice that though: did he notice that the three people selling his book actually have different readings of history? Did Chibber try and correct Zizek’s “historical sociology”? Or is it the case that when Zizek says “Hegel” we say Philosopher, but when Guha says it we say, Bad Historian? Oh, and did Zizek, Chomsky and Brenner (along with all the other Marxists) realise that Chibber is actually an adherent of liberal contract theory? (See the video of the debate, around 1 hr 29 minutes.) Or is it that its fine for Chibber to have an ideological affiliation so long as his ideology beats us senseless till we say, in exhaustion exasperation and desperation that yes, the history of capitalism is universal, basic needs exist, bread is bread no matter where its made, and we can only disagree on these “facts” when we enter Europe?

What a pathetic evasion. This post, and Chibber’s book, were perfectly clear that Guha’s arguments about European history are not the main point of his essay. The argument is simply that to the extent that Guha offers a causal account of *why* the history of India departs from the vision offered in liberal historiography, his account is dependent on a Whiggish narrative of European history. If that narrative is false, his theoretical arguments explaining why India developed a Dominance without Hegemony are wrong. You’ve said nothing in your post to challenge this actual argument, just offered some pointless lectures and ill-informed invective.

Yes, everything is an evasion barring your own post and supposed challenging questions to Chatterjee which plainly reveal your ignorance of SS, Guha, and Chatterjee. But lets leave that aside.

Even if the narrative is “false” it doesn’t in the least prove Guha’s argument “wrong.” It doesn’t prove him wrong because Guha’s case DOES NOT rest on factual the veracity of the French or English revolution. It rests of demolishing a particular way in which these facts were interpreted and applied to the study of Indian history. Guha is not concerned with whether his account of the French and English situation is accurate; he is challenging what has been extrapolated from these accounts in the writing of Indian history. The inability to make this basic distinction accounts for both, Chibber’s meaningless book and this even more illiterate post.

Nonetheless, lets leave that aside. What if the facts are indeed wrong? Does the historic failure of hegemony or everything else Chibber says actually imply that there is no distinction between the development of capitalism in Europe and in India? Is the SS project of showing the specificity of the Indian context rendered invalid because European evidence is going to show that the two situations CONFORM? Moreover, as in the reply to my comments, you have totally side-stepped mdb’s precise charge: that the reading of hegemony in Chibber is utterly and totally wrong. This isn’t simply bad intellectual history, its plain bad history driven by a totally inexplicable desire to produce a liberal-humanist view of universalism.

Consider for example Gramsci’s well-known influence on SS, to which mdb refers. Chibber has 3 references to Gramsci (apart from 2 footnotes) in his Entire text. In one of those, prior to launching into a multi-chapter discussion of a text which has the word HEGEMONY in its *title* Chibber says: “This book largely avoids the task of tracing the theoretical lineage of the Subalternists’ argument. As a result, even though the influence of Gramsci and Althusser is evident to those familiar with the relevant literature, I do not analyze the nature of this connection” (p 27.)

In fact in this paragraph, by arguing he doesn’t want to “distract” readers with theory, Chibber basically says: I’m going to read theory like its statistical analysis. I wonder what would happen if tomorrow a text was published that said “I know the influence of Lacan on Zizek, but I don’t want to distract the readers, so I won’t discuss psychoanalysis in my assessment of Zizek”?

Your supposedly triumphant claim that revising the facts would prove Guha wrong is mistaken also because you assume there are such things as “correct facts” that give rise to historical debates. The fact that the “correct” interpretation of the French revolution has not been arrived at even in 2013 should give people like Chibber some pause and let them reflect on what it means to provide a factual correction to a theoretical argument aimed at the interpretation of facts. But all this makes hatchet-jobs very dreary and boring. Or perhaps Chibber should announce, clearly and with no ambiguity, that we must not debate historical events until the facts have finally and forever been settled!

The larger problem underlying this entire fractious debate surrounding Chibber’s book is of course the fact that first, most of his supporters don’t know the first thing about SS and are simply happy to see any form of universalism being restored against the claims of postcolonial theory (even if it is a wishy-washy liberalism.) [By the way: since your post, inaccurately, claims that Guha’s books shows how much he relies on Whig history, you ought to note that Chibber’s book exemplifies a pre-1950s form of liberalism.]

Secondly, Chibber and his acolytes clearly cannot accommodate heterogeneity in ANY form, which is why the “paradox” of pre-capitalism is not a paradox at all for them; they simply explain it as capital’s ability to absorb heterogeneity. Where SS tried to RE-OPEN the question of the essence and ontology of capitalism, Chibber seeks to close it, fix it and produce it as a simple logical totality. Apart from leading to egregious misreadings of all of SS’s work, this leads Chibber to foreclose the possibility for generating thought that has to keep up with the challenges of the times. Explain to me, for instance, how, in a universalised global space of capital, *93%* of India’s labouring population exists outside the formal industry? THIS is Chatterjee and Chakrabarty and to some extent Guha’s challenge: to explain and understand these phenomena without taking recourse to old Marxist formulas that are assumed to be eternal. This is exactly the challenge Chibber and co. cannot live up to; it is exactly what propels Prabhat Patnaik to theorise the informal sector as the RESERVE ARMY! Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, the late Kalyan Sanyal, J K Gibson-Graham, Timothy Mitchell, James C Scott and many others are far closer to both an intellectual critique/extension of SS and a better understanding of contemporary capitalism.

Of course, given the tradition of your responses to everyone who disagrees with you I’m sure you will waste no time in telling me how I have once more missed Chibber’s most basic point. Perhaps its meant for higher minds, or more statistical ones. The best projects of intellectual history, even those premised on disagreement and discord, emerge from positions of generosity, from accepting the *terms* of the literature one is critiquing. This is why, for example, it is more rewarding to read Ernesto Laclau on Marxism and humanism than Christopher Hitchens or Francis Fukuyama. Vivek Chibber stood in the Delhi edition of HM, (knowing there were no cameras,) and talked about how working on the SS books were a dark and unrewarding period in his life, a time from which he gained nothing. Such are the origins of one of the worst attempts at intellectual history in recent years.

What a strikingly basic inability to read or think you demonstrate here. This, for example, is particularly rich:
“Your supposedly triumphant claim that revising the facts would prove Guha wrong is mistaken also because you assume there are such things as “correct facts” that give rise to historical debates. The fact that the “correct” interpretation of the French revolution has not been arrived at even in 2013 should give people like Chibber some pause and let them reflect on what it means to provide a factual correction to a theoretical argument aimed at the interpretation of facts. But all this makes hatchet-jobs very dreary and boring. Or perhaps Chibber should announce, clearly and with no ambiguity, that we must not debate historical events until the facts have finally and forever been settled!”

Of course, you don’t actually believe this nonsense. If someone were to say that the British rule in India was benevolent and beneficial to the colonized, you would rightly say that a whole host of facts reveal this claim to be pernicious nonsense. There are such things as facts and untruths about history. Now, when it comes to something as complex as the French revolution, we are on more complicated ground. But the basic shape of the terrain is familiar. There are some claims about the French revolution that are more plausible than other claims. To say that someone is wrong in their interpretation of the revolution isn’t to pronounce possession of some transcendental, incontrovertible truth about the event. It is to say that, according to the best evidence and interpretations we have, claim x is wrong. Now, maybe some day in the future new evidence and interpretations will show that claim x was right. This is perfectly possible with regard to Guha’s claims about Europe. But we don’t hold off the process of historical debate on the basis that future findings may prove us wrong. Indeed, that’s the premise of our work. We argue about present issues with the best evidence we have, holding in mind the possibility we may later be proven wrong. To claim that the debate about the French revolution isn’t settled does nothing here. Of course it isn’t. But on some issues, some claims are better supported than others. For your argument here to be relevant, you would have to show that the evidence Chibber presents is not convincing, or that other evidence supports Guha’s interpretation. Then we could have a debate about the evidence. But instead, you choose to pronounce that the debate is unsettled, while politely declining to offer any examples of issues where the historical record is more equivocal than Chibber’s presentation implies. The only real issue here that you’ve actually convinced me remains unsettled is why you think anyone would be convinced by such hollow argumentation.

On Gramsci, Guha gives us a very simple definition of what he means by hegemony: “As used in this work, hegemony stands or a condition of Dominance (D), such that, in the organic composition of D, Persuasion (P) outweighs Coercion(C)” (23). As usual, Guha is clear and says exactly what he means. Now, if you want to say you can’t understand what this really means without understanding Gramsci et al, the burden is on you to do so.

Then, there is this: “What if the facts are indeed wrong? Does the historic failure of hegemony or everything else Chibber says actually imply that there is no distinction between the development of capitalism in Europe and in India?” There is, quite simply, nothing that you will find in what either Chibber or I have written that will imply either of us thinks that there is no distinction between the development of capitalism in Europe and India. Nothing. Yet you insist on raising this absurd point because you are determined not to engage with the actual arguments being put forward, but to instead raise a host of irrelevant smokescreens, hoping that someone will mistake your bluster for substance.

Yet bluster is all it is. You repeat Chatterjee’s claim that Guha isn’t talking about what actually happened in Europe. Yet all we are offered to back this up is your word. I’ve given you the passages that I think demonstrate that he is talking about Europe. Offer me an interpretation of them that conforms to your theory about the text, and we can argue about it. I doubt you’ll do that, though, since it would take something more than empty condescension, which is all you’ve managed to offer so far.

To put things as plainly as possible: The argument isn’t over whether the histories of capitalism in Europe and India look different. Of course they do. That’s a premise of the argument. The argument is over what explains that difference. Guha puts forward one possible explanation in DwH: the bourgeoisie failed to universalize the liberal culture it created in Europe to the colonies. Chibber’s argument is that this explanation fails, because the bourgeoisie didn’t universalize a liberal culture in Europe. You say Guha doesn’t care about whether his account is accurate: maybe you’re right. But without that, he doesn’t have an explanation for why India’s political development does indeed look quite different from Europe’s. To say he doesn’t have an explanation isn’t to say his work is worthless, or anything like that. It’s just to say that we need a better explanation.

There seems to be a rather simple but glaring flaw in the logic of those who defend Guha’s argument. Guha’s argument, as I understand it, asserts a fundamental distinction between the bourgeoisie in the ‘West’ relative to that in the ‘East,’ owing to cultural factors. Assuming that we all agree, to demonstrate a distinction, one has to make a comparison. It doesn’t matter whether Chatterjee claims Guha’s work was not comparative, by virtue of asserting a distinction it must necessarily be comparative. To make a comparison, one has to establish, based on historical evidence, how at least two cases are analytically the same (both bourgeoisie) but historically different in an analytically meaningful way (one bourgeoisie hegemonic, one dominant but not hegemonic). In Guha’s case, the comparison that he makes is one in which the burden of proof rests on establishing that the Bourgeoisie in France and England were in fact different from the Bourgeoisie in the ‘East.’.Guha bases this proposition on a historiography that was in error in precisely the way that undermines his comparison. It doesn’t matter whether his work focuses mostly or only a little on France or England. What matters to this particular argument, as framed by Guha, is that it is a comparison, which is fundamentally dependent upon the efficacy of the analyses done by others on the transition to capitalism in England and France. Unfortunately for Guha, those analyses have been found wanting. That’s not Guha’s fault, but it does undermine the efficacy of his own argument. This all seems incredibly simple and straightforward to me. Some defenders seem to want to respond that life is more complicated. Yes, but the logic of this argument is not, and that is the point. Other defenders want to minimize the importance of the European historiography that has been called into question. No. it is not of fundamental importance to everything, but it is of central importance to Guha’s argument, and that is the unavoidable point.

In addition, I don’t understand why those who are defending SS keep repeating the line that Chibber implied that universal means homogeneous, even though Chibber clearly states that they are not. To me, this seems more and more a carefully calculated attempt on the part of SS defender to purposely infer that Chibber view the two as synonymous in order to discredit his argument about the universal applicability of the category of class for the analysis of those who live under class domination. Either that or these people are making a poor attempt to read and/or listen to Chibber.

And thank you, Paleface, for the afternoon entertainment. If I understand you right: a brown man wrote some misguided things about Europe, but pointing out that they are wrong is, er, ‘white Marxism at its best.’ [1]

I presume that you think this is another in a long-list of (white) Marxism’s racist

What is actually racist, of course, is your presumption that we brown men (yes, I am one of you) are so intellectually and emotionally fragile that even when we’re wrong we have to be told we’re right.

What bollocks, dude. I am in pain as I consider the possibility that you believe these words you write.

[1] Only when the critic is white? Or can brown men (i.e., Vivek Chibber) imbibe ‘white Marxism’? Very curious.

the debate on the french revolution is not sealed from interpretation. this does not need to be demonstrated by examples. it is plainly evident to anyone who has read histories and historiographies of the f.r.
if one concedes that the situation in europe and india warrant distinct, context specific analysis (which is precisely what chibber rejects,) then that is enough to justify guha and all of subalternism. the failure of the bourgeoisie to universalize a liberal culture in europe (even if one were to grant this, which one wont,) doesn’t have any bearing on guha’s reading of india – unless one claims that the failure of bourgeois universalism somehow means the terms and concepts of european history can unproblematically be applied to the study of india. if one maintains that they cant, the debate is over. chibber’s true targets are european historians who differ on french history, not subalternism, the main aim of which was to free indian thought from the clutches of the intellectual domination of europe. its very revealing that chibber’s “reading” is confined to mainly the first 80 pages of the book and a few scattered refs till the early 130s. after that, almost no references, which is interesting and shows how uninterested chibber is in the actual historiography of india – which was the true aim of subalternist intervention. once again this bears repeating: even if we grant (which we don’t) that guha’s reading of europe is inaccurate, this changes nothing if we admit that an analysis of indian must emerge from its own conceputal context. unless we contend that the historic failure of bourgeois hegemony in both contexts implies that both contexts can be studied using the same conceptual vocabulary, a critique like chibber’s has no meaning. contrary to what is stated above, denying context-specificity is at the very core of chibber’s project. hence he writes: “Against this backdrop, what Guha considers a deviation from Europe’s story—the creation of a fractured political nation, the exclusion of the dominated groups, the gap between elite and subaltern— is in fact directly aligned with it.” the point is, even if one concedes (which again, one doesnt) that “the creation of a fractured political nation, the exclusion of the dominated groups, the gap between elite and subaltern” are features common to europe and india, the concession doesnt get us any closer to understanding india. for that you still need to engage with the entirety of guha’s text; or claim (as v.c. does,) that basically once you identify structural similarities in the two contexts, the “eastern” story is no longer a deviation.
what chibber doesn’t realise (or more cleverly, elides to mention) is that guha’s critique —or chatterjee’s or others’— is not aimed at the factual reading of european history. surely no one today can deny that certain assumptions about bourgeois culture, hegemony, liberalism, democracy and the rule became commonsense in social theory deriving from historical readings of the f.r. surely one cant deny that these categories derived from historical readings were applied in social theory, philosophy, history and colonial writings. and if one agrees to this surely one must concede that a challenge to this wider body of work cannot rest on disproving their factual basis (which will always be contested.) these wider theoretical arguments need to be challenged on their own terms. and until we cant agree on this the debate on chibber will remain stagnant.